Redecorating
by Mals86
Summary: Nadia has moved in with Bob, within several weeks after the events of the movie/book. They're building a relationship and taking steps to make Bob's parents' house their own. Bob's finding the courage to break out of his lonely rut. (This was originally published under Warrior 2011, until a category could be created for The Drop.)
1. Chapter 1

**Redecorating**

"Well, how about this one?" Nadia asked, pointing. "You like that one? You want to keep it?"

Bob barely looked up from where he was cleaning the baseboard in the living room. It was Tuesday morning, his normal day off, and the one he usually spent doing errands and cleaning the house. This whole idea of Nadia's made him nervous. This had been his parents' house, and in his mind, it still was. He just lived here, same as he had every one of his days on the earth.

"Bob? How about this one?" Nadia repeated. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her put her other hand on her waist.

She was being patient, Bob could tell. But he didn't know what to say. He didn't know if he could handle this redecorating project after all. He inhaled deeply, and sat back on his haunches to look. He owed Nadia that much, at least, a look at whatever she was talking about.

It was a framed print of St. Helena, wearing her crown and red robe and carrying her wooden cross.

"Who is that, anyway?" Nadia asked. "You go to church all the time, you should know." She never fussed about it. But she didn't get up and go with him, either.

"St. Helena. Mother of Constantine the Great, that's why she got the crown on. And she went to the Holy Land and found the true cross. That's my mother's name saint, Helena." Nadia blinked at him, and then opened her mouth to say something else, but he surprised himself and went on talking. "My mother's name was Elaine, that's like a, a variation on Helena."

"Oh." There was a pause. "So… do you want to keep it? It's okay if you do, you just need to decide."

He thought of the way that he never even saw the things in frames anymore. They were just there, and his gaze always went over and past them because they were familiar.

But he could remember his mother without her name saint on the wall. "Take it down." He nodded once and went back to cleaning the baseboard. Amazing how dusty it got, even when you vacuumed every week. "What?" he said to the half-heard sound of Nadia's voice.

Nadia sighed loud enough to make him look up. "I said, what about the rest of the saint pictures in the house? Or the Jesuses? There's this painted plate in the hallway…"

"I don't know."

"… and this print in the bathroom upstairs, and the one with lambs in the hallway near your bedroom… and this Last Supper in the dining room here, it's not a bad picture but this is a _really _ugly frame, Bob. Do you like it?"

Bob had looked at that Last Supper picture every dinnertime and Sunday lunch when his mother was alive. Once she'd passed on, twelve years ago – three years after his father passed – it just didn't seem worth it to eat in the dining room, and he'd been eating every meal at the round kitchen table instead. "I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know? You have an opinion, don't you?" Nadia said.

His thighs were killing him now, and he sat on the floor. "_I don't know_."

Nadia set down the blown glass blue fish that used to sit in the octagon window of the hall. She came across the room and sat down on the floor too, near enough to Bob that their knees touched. He felt his body respond to the touch, all out of proportion to just touching knees, and moved his away a fraction of an inch. Rocco had heard them, though. He woke up from his nap and started whimpering in his crate, wanting to come out and be with them.

Nadia put her hand on Bob's thigh, which was not helping with the lust thing. For Chrissakes, they were talking about St. Helena and the Last Supper and his mother, how the hell could he be getting a stiffie? Another one. Again.

Waiting for bedtime was so difficult. Ever since Nadia had moved in, two weeks ago, he wanted to be with her all the time. And not just with her in the room, he wanted to be with her and on top of her and _in_ her.

Every minute.

"Wasted his life waitin' for it to start," Cousin Marv had said of him. Maybe so. There was something to it, maybe, because now he felt that his life had started, he kept trying to make up for lost time. Even work couldn't take all his attention. It was complicated, running the bar by himself, ordering all the stock himself. He had to stay on top of it, or he'd get sucked down under. But some small part of his mind, even while he slung Amstel Lights and stacked glasses in the dishwasher and did inventory at the bar, stayed with Nadia.

The arch of her eyebrows over those deep eyes of hers. Her delicate mouth. The feminine shape of her under the covers. The way her thighs came up and gripped his ribs when they were –

_Jesus._ There he went again.

Rocco whimpered in his crate in the kitchen, scratched at the wire. "In a minute, sweetie," Nadia called to the dog, and made a kissy noise at him. Bob shifted positions, trying to get comfortable in his jeans. Nadia patted his thigh again. "You know, we don't have to do this," she said, in her soft, barely-accented voice. "Not now. Not ever, if you don't want to."

Bob opened his mouth, and then shut it. It was harder to think with half the blood gone out of his head.

"But, you know… you said…" Nadia sighed and started again. "When we went to have dinner with Dottie last weekend, you said that you used to like the basement in that house when you were a kid, and now it seems sad to you because it hasn't changed at all since then. And you said you felt like nothing changed in this house, either. So… I thought you really wanted to change things. Make this house more like what you want, not what your mother liked."

_I do, _Bob thought._ I do want that. But changing things to what I want, that's selfish, isn't it?_

"It's not selfish to want what you want," Nadia said, as if she was reading his mind. When his face reacted, she explained. She was good at knowing when he didn't understand people. "This is your house, isn't it?"

_My parents' house,_ he thought.

"It's been your house since your mother died," she said. "Nobody else lives here."

That was true. It was. Bob had been alone for so long. So maybe it _was_ his house.

"I found out when I was packing to move in here – well, certain things I wanted to keep, you know?" Nadia had brought two big suitcases with her, and two big boxes of personal things, including those wind chimes she'd kept attached to her kitchen doorknob in her old place. She'd grown up there, she'd told him. She'd been six when she and her mother had moved in, fresh from Romania; she'd been eight when her mother had married Nick Dunne. Thirteen when her mother died of an overdose. Fifteen when her stepfather began coming into her room drunk to touch her. Nineteen when Dunne crashed his car and died. There had been her years of drugs and too many boyfriends and inescapable waves of despair.

Nadia had hung her wind chimes on Bob's mother's kitchen doorknob. Bob liked to open the door now, liked to open it and breathe in the spring air as the earth swelled open with good things. He liked to hear Nadia's chimes on his door. It was pleasant to get home from work and not be the only one in the house. It was especially pleasant that the other person in the house was Nadia.

Nadia patted his thigh again. Rocco whimpered again. "But it was good to let most of them go. I felt – free. Like the past was letting go of me."

Bob looked away for a minute, embarrassed. She could probably see that he wanted her. She could definitely see that he felt odd about throwing away his parents' things. "How did you do it?" he asked. "Decide what to keep?"

"Oh," she said. "I took everything down, you know, 'cause I was moving. Everything I touched, I looked at it and thought about how it made me feel. And if it didn't make me happy, it went out."

"I hate the thought of throwing everything out," Bob admitted. He was settling down again, with her voice so calm. "It's just such a waste. Like shitting out food you shouldn't have eaten in the first place." _I cursed in front of a lady,_ he thought, and even though Nadia regularly swore worse than he ever did, he still felt bad about it. "'Scuse my language."

Nadia laughed a little and patted his leg again, this time a little closer to his personals. The blood rushed back. "We don't have to throw it out," she said. "We can give it away. Somebody might be glad to find these things at the Goodwill store."

Bob looked into her dark eyes. She'd said "We," meaning him and her._ She said we._

"So maybe can I have your attention and we can work through this room?" Nadia asked. "We can go slow."

"Let's do it," Bob said, still unsettled but willing to trust her. "Come on." He let her help him up.

Rocco howled in his crate, and they almost fell over their own legs trying to go let him out before he started thinking they didn't love him. "Come on out, baby, good boy," Nadia cooed, and Bob's heart melted a little.

They argued a little over the plastic on the sofa and the easy chair, Bob taking his mother's view that to leave the fabric exposed was to court spills and spots and dust and wear, and Nadia arguing that they made fabric spot cleaner, and how on earth were they going to even sit on furniture with dust covers on it? "You don't sit on it," Bob explained, "except when you have company. It's parlor furniture."

"And since when have you had company?" Nadia demanded.

Well, that was a point. At this stage, "company" consisted of Dottie, maybe, and Nadia's stepcousins, if they ever decided to un-estrange her.

"What about the piano?" Nadia asked, pointing at it. "It's a nice piano. You never play it."

His mother had played it. She'd played ragtime music and hymns, and sometimes boogie-woogie, and she'd laughed out of happiness when she was doing it.

"You could sell it on Craigslist or something if you don't want to keep it. Donate the money to the church in your parents' memory," she explained hurriedly when he balked at the idea of selling his mother's piano to strangers for money. "It's got a nice sound," Nadia said dreamily, caressing the lid. He looked at her, wondering if she played while he was at the bar. His face must have looked funny, because she blushed. "Someday I'd like to learn how to play," she explained, and right then he determined that he'd get her some lessons.

"Piano stays," he said.

The plastic came off the furniture, and Bob began to feel rather wickedly decadent. He had the fleeting naughty thought that it would be certainly fine to be on top of Nadia on the couch, with the satiny fabric under her satiny skin – and he shook it off. That wasn't decent. It was broad daylight, and in the parlor too…

He thought that someday he might like to be indecent with Nadia.

They kept the piecrust table, and Nadia liked the doilies that Grandmother Shipler had made, so they kept those too.

In the end, they stacked up most of the pictures, except the photos of family, to give away. They wrapped up the glass bowls and the ceramic figurines and the carved wooden pieces and set them carefully in booze boxes, to be donated. Nadia was all for ditching the white urn lamp with the pussy willow shade, but Bob remembered how Dottie liked that lamp, and he set it aside for Dottie. The étagères looked bare and pointless once they'd gotten all the display items off them, and so Bob decided to move them out to the foyer to see what the room looked like without them.

With the frames off the walls, you could see where the wallpaper and the paint had faded around where they had been. They would have to paint again. Re-wallpaper. That was okay, it hadn't been done in years, and maybe Bob might choose his own colors this time. Better, he'd choose them with Nadia. He stood in the center of the dining room and looked around at everything.

He liked it.

It was – _different_, but a good kind of different. It was spacious, and you could feel that spring air coming through the room from where Nadia had cracked a front window open. Here he'd always thought that this house was small, but it wasn't so small. It had maybe just been crammed full of too much stuff. And Rocco liked it too, he could tell. Rocco kept running back and forth in the newly open space.

The kitchen was harder, because Bob kept seeing his father's hands holding that coffee cup, or his mother's hands setting that casserole dish on a hot mat on the counter. And Rocco kept sticking his nose into cabinets and getting in their way. Bob made sure the gate was closed and let him out into the back yard, smiling at the sound of Nadia's wind chimes on the doorknob.

They argued a little over the kitchen stuff too. But when Nadia explained that she could barely find anything to cook _in _because there was so much of it – well, then he began to decide. He wanted to keep the casserole dish. He wanted _Babcia_ Saginowski's set of china. He wanted the aluminum lamb cake pan that his mother had made Easter cakes in, not that he was going to make cakes in it but he wanted it anyway. The rest he didn't care about. The Jenny Lind shelf, the mismatched plates, the blue duck his mother had kept on the counter, the painted plaster teapot clock, the fringed lampshades, they all went into the back of the Ranger to await transport to the Goodwill.

"That's enough," Nadia exclaimed. "I'm tired, and it's past dinner time. We can get to the upstairs next week or something." Rocco whined at the back door, and Nadia went to let him in. "Dinner time, puppy? You heard me say dinner?" She went to feed Rocco. Rocco sat in front of his bowl and waited.

"_Good_ boy," Bob said to him, and "Let's go out," to Nadia. This reckless mood was catching. "Guglio's?"

Nadia put food in Rocco's bowl and then looked up at Bob in surprise. "I'll have to shower if we're going somewhere that fancy."

He shrugged. That was no trouble.

"Can we just order pizza in instead? I have salad in the fridge. There's beer, too."

"You can have whatever you want. You don't have to sweet-talk me."

She looked at him again, and shook her head. "You're so good to me." There were tears in her eyes, and he didn't understand why.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"Are you sure you're okay with this?" she said abruptly. "Me getting rid of all of your stuff?"

"I think I like it," he admitted, quashing the tiny impulse of guilt over letting go of his mother's things. They weren't his. And his mother had always wanted to please him, anyway. If she knew how happy he was now, maybe it would make up for what he'd done. "And, you know… you live here too. It's your house too."

He thought of what it would be like, coming home to Nadia every night, Nadia waiting in his parents' house that was turning into their house, his and Nadia's, now, and he couldn't hold the smile back.

Nadia went to her knees, patting Rocco and crooning to him. Her voice sounded funny, and she turned her head away.

_Shit. What have I done?_

He knelt next to her and laid a hand on Rocco's head beside hers. "Nadia? Did I say something wrong? You're cryin'."

Nadia wiped her cheeks. "Nothing is wrong." She put her hand on his, and smiled through the tears at him. "Everything is right. Everything is all right, Bob."

That strange feeling was back, the one that he'd finally identified as happiness. "You should smile more," she told him, her voice getting steady again.

Which made him smile more.


	2. Chapter 2

I know, I know… what am I doing updating a completed story? Confusing.

However, bear with me a minute. I wanted to explain that I would be removing most of my multi-chapter fics from this site. The reason is that one of my bestest writer-buddies, Wynter S. Komen, just found out that someone had STOLEN her story, "In the Land of Gods and Monsters," changed some details, and published it as a Kindle ebook. For sale. For _money_.

In fact, not one but two different people (or the same person with two different pen names) stole her story and published it, and profited from someone else's work.

And while I am beyond grateful to Fanfiction for providing a platform and an outlet for those of us who love stories to share them, free, out of our hearts, I'm no longer willing to risk having stories stolen and sold.

I will be leaving my profile here, as well as my two short fics and the first chapters of my longer fics, but everything else will be removed.

I'm sorry.

I'm hurt, too. I am proud of these stories I've posted here, and sad that they're going to be tucked away and not read anymore. I know that if you've come here to read this story, you're disappointed too.

I am still enormously glad that I've met so many terrific readers and writers here, and I am thankful every day that I met Wynter S. Komen and Nik216 here. It was on Fanfiction that we met and began corresponding, and began a triumvirate focused on encouragement and improving our writing, and now the three of us are ready to begin careers as writers. This is a huge deal for us, and someday I hope to announce that we have secured publishing contracts.

I will not be posting any new stories or resurrecting the ones I've removed. I feel that this chapter of my writing life has closed – and we all know that feeling, don't we? Where you're satisfied by the happily-ever-after part but sad that it's finally arrived.

I want to wish you all continued happy reading on this site. If you'd like to contact me, please do – I will be reachable at wynn AT wynnguthrie DOT com (sorry about the bot-defeating strategy there).


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